Are you leveraging your key customers and employees as multipliers?

A Simple Truth

Not all customers and are created equal. For the majority of businesses, 80% of profitability will be generated by 20% of customers. These folks are the “vital few” of your customers. Similarly, not all employees are created equal. 80% of the value generated typically comes from 20% of employees.

A similar idea was driven home in a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown. The book speaks to leadership and how great leaders get more from their employees. Essentially it showcases how these multipliers stretch the abilities of their team to achieve results that exceed expectations. The opposite of a multiplier is a diminisher. Diminishers focus on themselves and drain the intelligence out of others.

Doubling down: You want Multipliers

In the words of author Liz Wiseman,

“Multipliers don’t just get a little more from their people, they get vastly more. When we asked people how much of their capability, their ideas, their energy diminishers got from them versus multipliers, we found that diminishers on average got 48 percent of people’s brainpower. Multipliers on average got 97 percent. So you can actually double the brainpower of your organization for free. You don’t need additional resources to potentially get twice the capability out of the staff you already have.”

The same concept that apply to leadership can be applied to customer experience as well as employee engagement. Let’s look at the five disciplines of Multipliers:

Credit: Leadership Now

1. The Talent Magnet – Are you creating an environment that’s conducive to retaining your top customers and employees?

2. The Liberator – Do you bring intensity to your work that keeps top customers and employees on top of their game?

3. The Challenger – Are you finding creative ways to stretch the capabilities of your top customers and employees?

4. The Debate Maker – Are you speaking last? Finding ways to engage top employees and customers into decision-making and product development processes?

5. The Investor – Are you allowing top customers and employees the opportunity to own key segments of a program or initiative?

Today’s Lagniappe (a little something extra thrown in for good measure) – Sometimes in life, you just have to double down. Here’s a money clip from the 1996 classic Swingers with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau: